Mid Atlantic Broadcast Stories and Descriptions

Early Life   Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was born on November 30, 1835 as a sixth child of  Jane  and john  Marshall out  of  seven   His father Jane was originally from Kentucky and his mother   John was from  Virgina. His parents met when his father moved to Missouri and they were married in 1823but later on only Three of his siblings were surviving  out of six.        Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River when he was  four.  That town was the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Slavery was legal in Missouri that time, and it became a theme in his writings. His father was an attorney and judge, who died of pneumonia in 1847, when Twain was 11. The next year, Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter, contributing articles and humorous sketches to the Hannibal Journal, a ne